Four Musts in Redesigning K-12 Education

"We love project-based learning but when will we get time to plan with our colleagues?" -- Union Leader

"We want to have our students participate in rigorous project learning but our teachers need to learn how to do it -- it's challenging." -- Middle School Principal

In the last two weeks, I have heard all three of these statements during presentations about project-based learning and student performance-based assessment. These are legitimate and important questions. As we move to redesign our national, state and local curriculum towards preparation for college and career readiness, schools will be inclined to employ a project and performance-based system.

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This shift towards deeper learning requires a redesign of our K-12 schools. While redesign can be complex, there are three design shifts that schools can make now that will foster deeper learning, and a fourth that offers hope for the future.

Professional Development: Teachers deserve and need at least three days of targeted professional development every summer to learn these new skills. However that is not enough; the summer professional development needs to be followed up each year with at least two more workshops during the school year. If school systems lack the expertise to provide this type of professional development, they can contract with organizations like the Buck Institute of Education (BIE) or Envision Learning Partners.

Collaboration Time: Teachers need at least 90 minutes per week to collaborate with their colleagues to design, plan, and/or assess student work. Building on the movement for professional learning communities (PLC's), this time needs to well planned, facilitated and productive. This time should make teachers job easier and not be a burden of "another meeting."

Assessment Time: Do the math, if a teacher has to assess 100 deep assignments (no matter what level K-12) and each assessment takes five minutes, this is 500 minutes of time or 8.5 hours. Teachers need to find this time after school since they spend 95 percent of their day with students. We need to build in time for teachers to assess student work. Unless we find time for teachers to assess deep student work they will continue to assign "thin" assignments; it is a matter of survival.

New Technology: New technologies hold a promise to address some of these design challenges. A new online tool, ShowEvidence, claims that it will reduce the time it takes teachers to assess performance-based assessment by 50 percent. This could be a game changer for teachers.

What if we could automate the process of assessing performance work? What if a computer could assess deep student work as well as humans? Last week, the Hewlett Foundation launched a new competition in partnership with OpenEd and hosted on Kaggle.com to automate scoring of deep student work. This type of tool could exponentially increase deep assignments. As Tom Vander Ark explains, "Online essay scoring will improve the quality of state testing, but the real benefit will be the weekly use in classrooms.

Teachers across the curriculum will be able to assign 1500 words a week -- not 1500 words a semester -- and know that students will receive frequent automated feedback as well as the all important and incisive teacher feedback."

If you have redesigned your school, what did you do and how did you do it? If not, what is holding you back from going deeper with student learning? What design shifts do you need?